Motorola Moto G9 Power
A perfect phone? Absolutely not. But if you’re after truly stunning battery life, you’ve come to the right place
SCORE
PRICE £150 (£180 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com
As its name suggests, the Moto G9 Power offers something different to the endless stream of phones appearing on our shelves (and that’s just from Motorola). It has the biggest battery of any Motorola phone to date, with the alluring promise of an enormous 60 hours of life from a single charge.
And you’re getting this for a knockdown price. At £180, the G9 Power undercuts its most obvious big-battery rival – the Samsung Galaxy M31 ( see issue 312, p70) – by £65. As if that wasn’t enough, the G9 Power also offers a 6.8in display, 128GB of storage (expandable via microSD up to 512GB) and a 64MP main camera. What pacts with the devil has Motorola struck to achieve this feat?
Drastic plastic
The first notable sacrifice is in the construction. Motorola attempts to distract with its eye-catching “Electric Violet” and “Metallic Sage” colours, but there’s no avoiding this phone’s plastic construction or its size. Thanks to the chunky 6,000mAh battery, the G9 Power weighs a hefty 221g while a 6.8in screen means it isn’t the easiest phone to slip into a pocket. Also note that the fingerprint reader sits high on the rear, so you may find it tricky to unlock with small hands.
Nevertheless, I’m a fan of the wavy effects that adorn the Moto G9 Power’s rear panel, which remind me of the ridges of a fingerprint. The square camera housing – which bears more than a passing resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s quad-barrelled “Flash” rocket launcher in Commando – is another nice touch. The housing is roughly half the size of the iPhone 12 Pro’s and, to my eyes at least, looks much neater.
Snappy snaps
What's more, those cameras are pretty good. The Moto G9 Power has a triple-camera array on the back: there’s a 64MP f/1.8 primary unit that captures 16MP “pixel-binned” images by default, a 2MP macro camera and a depth-sensing camera. Note that the latter serves as a tool for more effective blurred-background (bokeh) portraits and nothing more.
The 2MP macro camera is more useful. It means you can capture objects up to a minimum distance of 2.5cm and, while you might not use it very frequently, the pictures are impressive. For the best results, though, I recommend using a tripod or a gimbal, since even the slightest of hand movements this close up results in a blurry picture.
Motorola claims that the main camera’s light-gathering abilities are four times better than those of its predecessor. We no longer have a Moto G8 Power ( see issue 308, p68) to directly test this claim, but the sensor is a larger 1/1.97in compared with 1/2.8in and it translates into remarkable performance. On a sunny winter afternoon in London, I captured detail-rich images of local skyscrapers, as well as boats whizzing down the Thames, with a pleasingly neutral colour palette and welljudged exposures.
I’m less enamoured with this camera’s low-light photography. Visual noise is noticeable throughout, and the camera often struggled to focus on whatever I was pointing at. They aren’t the worst nighttime pictures I’ve seen, but the M31 produces better results.
I can live with this, but a bigger irritation is that the camera software often struggles to keep pace. Sometimes there’s a noticeable shutter delay, and the viewfinder lags behind a fraction of a second when panning in low-light environments. Switching to video, the G9 Power can record 1080p video at 60fps, but doesn’t support optical stabilisation in any of the shooting modes.
Nor is video capture a strength: although the footage is packed with intricate details, it suffers terribly from focus hunting – so much so, in fact, that a lot of my test footage was unusable.
Take it slow
The main reason the Moto G9 Power struggles to keep up in such demanding applications is that it’s powered by a modest eight-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 processor. This is faster than the Galaxy M31 and its Samsung Exynos 9611 chip, but not by much: in Geekbench 5’s multicore test it returned 1,420 to the M31’s 1,219, with a single-core result of 313 versus 264.
Testing in GFXBench paints a similar picture for gaming
“The Moto G9 Power lasted an astonishing 26hrs 51mins in our video-rundown test, which places it third on the all-time list”
performance, with marginal gains on the Moto G8 Power as well as the Galaxy M31. In the Manhattan 3 test it achieved a 34fps average (the M31 returned 24fps, the G8 Power 18fps), which suggests it will cope with most Google Play store games. Set your expectations to “modest”.
Where you should set high expectations, however, is the Moto G9 Power’s stamina. It lasted an astonishing 26hrs 51mins in our video-rundown test, which places it third on our all-time list: only the long-discontinued Lenovo P2 (28hrs 50mins) and the Samsung Galaxy M31 (30hrs 20mins) kept going for longer.
To put that in perspective, the Moto G9 Power lasted four-and-a-half hours longer than the Moto G8 Power under the same conditions and I typically squeezed out more than two days of real-world use. Usually, my array of camera tests make a big impact on battery life, but here the indicator fell a mere 4%.
Putting on a big display
This battery life is all the more impressive when you consider the size of the
Moto G9 Power’s screen, which at 6.8in is almost the same size as a Galaxy Note phablet. However, compared to such luxury devices, the Moto’s resolution is a relatively low 720 x 1,640, and this has its downsides on a screen this big. It’s fine if you’re viewing photos, but when browsing the web text looks fuzzier than on a high-resolution device.
Nor is colour reproduction a strength, with sRGB colour gamut coverage of 83.5% and a total volume of 88.9% in the “Natural” display setting. The good news is the Moto G9 Power’s display is bright enough to use outdoors on sunny days, with a measured peak luminance of 510cd/m2 with the phone’s auto-brightness setting engaged. A contrast ratio of 1,927:1 is also good for the price.
My final note about the display concerns the pinhole notch that eats its way into the top-left corner. This houses a single 16MP camera that produces results best described as “adequate”.
Power play
It’s a shame about the screen’s weaknesses because, putting them aside, the Moto G9 Power is great value. Performance is solid for a phone under £200 and I can’t enthuse about the battery enough – it just won’t quit.
If you’re willing to compromise on video capture and display quality, you’ll find a competent and reliable budget smartphone in the Moto G9 Power. However, if you can stretch another £65 for the Samsung Galaxy M31, you’ll be buying a more rounded device.
SPECIFICATIONS
Eight-core 2GHz/1.8GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 662 4GB RAM Adreno 610 graphics 6.8in 60Hz IPS screen, 720 x 1,640 resolution 128GB storage triple 64MP/2MP/ 2MP rear camera 16MP front camera Wi-Fi 5 Bluetooth 5
NFC USB-C connector 3.5mm jack 6,000mAh battery Android 10 77 x 9.7 x 172mm (WDH) 221g 1yr warranty